“Gen Z are sabotaging their company’s AI rollout!” The news is full of clickbait, but a recent article from Fortune stood out to me. It discusses a report about young office workers intentionally undermining artificial intelligence implementation at their workplaces.
According to the story, one method they use is purposely causing security and information breaches (Angelo 2026). This echoed in my mind as I had just presented a safety moment about an incident where internal data had been accidentally included in building an application using a public AI tool. This incident involved low risk data, and the consequences were minimal, but there was a link here between dramatics in the media and reality at work.
In the past year or so, we have discussed safety moments at work related to not only exposing internal information into public AI systems, but also events such as unknown AI Assistants entering Teams meetings. There is no doubt that these GenAI “abilities” pose a security threat and are a vector that could result in a serious breach of information or hack of internal IT systems. Add the risks of workslop and lack of creativity, and GenAI could be very much a serious threat to a company or institution.
Looking at the root causes of these security events, they are driven by people who have a real need. Skilled scientists and engineers see the potential, and especially if you look at the high demand on the energy industry today, the pressure to do more with the same is high. The demands on more barrels, more prospects, more kWh are significant in today’s geopolitical situation. It is not a difficult assumption to make that engineers and scientists are looking for that “clone” of themselves to relieve this pressure. AI is tantalizingly close to being that clone with what we see coming out of the software development industry and these AI tools are relatively easy to access.
At March’s EAGE Digital 2026 in my home of Stavanger, while there were a lot of reflections on AI, almost all operators present mentioned the importance of competence development to not only create value from these tools, but to control risks. This is all good and fine to say, but what actions should be taken?
As a leader with line accountability in a large company, it is part of my responsibility to protect the company’s assets and own the risk. Risk frameworks should equally apply to AI – take accountability, understand and communicate risks, record incidents and events, and perhaps most importantly, listen to your team. Some other actions are to showcase the curious who are already trying these tools, expose the limitations of AI as part of any competence development program, and ultimately transfer safety culture to AI and turn mistakes into learning.
What do you think? Do our current industry risk frameworks translate to GenAI? AI technology shows no sign of slowing – and we are an industry with high demand and pressure on people. Are competence and leadership the two most important priorities to safely create value and produce the products the world needs?
References:
Angelo, J., 2026. Gen Z workers are so fearful AI will take their job they’re
intentionally sabotaging their company’s AI rollout. Fortune, 8 April 2026.
Available at: https://fortune.com/2026/04/08/gen-z-workers-sabotage-ai-rollout-
backlash/ (accessed 27 April 2026).
Ashley Russell is Leader Subsurface Data Science and Analytics at Equinor.
Views expressed in this column are solely those of the author.
